Soul Power

Young Cynthia A. Young

Description

Soul Power is a cultural history of those whom Cynthia A. Young calls "U.S. Third World Leftists," activists of color who appropriated theories and strategies from Third World anticolonial struggles in their fight for social and economic justice in the United States during the "long 1960s." Nearly thirty countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America declared formal independence in the 1960s alone. Arguing that the significance of this wave of decolonization to U.S. activists has been vastly underestimated, Young describes how literature, films, ideologies, and political movements that originated in the Third World were absorbed by U.S. activists of color. She shows how these transnational influences were then used to forge alliances, create new vocabularies and aesthetic forms, and describe race, class, and gender oppression in the United States in compelling terms.Young analyzes a range of U.S. figures and organizations, examining how each deployed Third World discourse toward various cultural and political ends. She considers a trip that LeRoi Jones, Harold Cruse, and Robert F. Williams made to Cuba in 1960; traces key intellectual influences on Angela Y. Davis's writing; and reveals the early history of the hospital workers' 1199 union as a model of U.S. Third World activism. She investigates Newsreel, a late 1960s activist documentary film movement, and its successor, Third World Newsreel, which produced a seminal 1972 film on the Attica prison rebellion. She also considers the L.A. Rebellion, a group of African and African American artists who made films about conditions in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. By demonstrating the breadth, vitality, and legacy of the work of U.S. Third World Leftists, Soul Power firmly establishes their crucial place in the history of twentieth-century American struggles for social change.

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• History of the Americas
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822388616
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

soul power

soul power .

C ULT UR E , R ADI C AL I S M,

A N D T H E MA K I N G O F A

U. S. THI RD WORLD LEFT

CYNTHI A A. YOUNG

.

D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

DurhamandLondon 2006

∫D U K E 2 0 0 6 P R E S SU N I V E R S I T Y All rights reserved. Printed in the

United States of America on acid-free

paper$Designed by Amy Ruth

Buchanan. Typeset in Minion and

Frutiger by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication data and republication

acknowledgments appear on the last

printed pages of this book.

DukeUniversityPressgratefully

acknowledgesthesupportoftheDepart-

mentofEnglishattheUniversityof

SouthernCalifornia,whichprovided

fundstowardtheproductionofthisbook.

ForBettyJ.Young andthelateMelvinF.Young forteachingmewhatitmeans tobeaccountabletoothers.

Preface ix Acknowledgments

Introduction

1

xiii

Contents .

1. Havana Up in Harlem and Down in Monroe: Armed Revolt and the Making of a Cultural Revolution 18 2. Union Power, Soul Power: Class Struggle by Cultural Means 54 3. Newsreel: Rethinking the Filmmaking Arm of the New Left 100 4. Third World Newsreel Visualizes the Internal Colony 145 5. Angela Y. Davis and U.S. Third World Left Theory and Praxis 184 6. Shot in Watts: Film and State Violence in the 1970s 209

Coda

245

Notes 253 Bibliography and Filmography Index 295

271

Preface .

Too often, academic writers enjoy the pretense that our books are solely the result of painstakingly conducted research rather than the product of deeply held personal beliefs and prejudices that drive our careful research. The more we deny a personal investment that mars a supposedly unclouded objectivity, the more validation we get, as if the lines between the personal and the profes- sional do not always cross and converge. Instead of relying on this thin subter- fuge, I acknowledge up front that this story of boundary crossers, of activists and artists, workers and students who reimagined national, racial, and individ- ual identities in the 1960s and 1970s is deeply connected to my personal history. Born in a Midwestern suburb, the child of a black and white union, I have always been fascinated by the sixties. Perhaps this is because I turned one in 1970 and so experienced them from an increasingly nostalgic distance; the drama of Woodstock or Haight-Ashbury seemed as far away from Shaker Heights, Ohio, as the moon. Perhaps I became obsessed with the sixties be- cause my parents were Popular Front rather than flower children with stories of protest marches and pot smoking to retell. Or maybe it is because my parents, the daughter of an Irish coal miner and union activist and the son of a black electrician, understood themselves to be living Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream. Whatever the reason, the nostalgia-dripped, one-dimensional images of the sixties—peace, love, and freedom—provided the backdrop against which